MoRoCo: Multi-operator-robot Coordination, Interaction and Exploration under Restricted Communication

Abstract: Fleets of autonomous robots are increasingly deployed alongside multiple human operators to explore unknown environments, identify salient features, and perform complex tasks in scenarios such as subterranean exploration, reconnaissance, and search-and-rescue missions. In these contexts, communication is often severely limited to short-range exchanges via ad-hoc networks, posing challenges to coordination. While recent studies have addressed multi-robot exploration under communication constraints, they largely overlook the essential role of human operators and their real-time interaction with robotic teams. Operators may demand timely updates on the exploration progress and robot status, reprioritize or cancel tasks dynamically, or request live video feeds and control access. Conversely, robots may seek human confirmation for anomalous events or require help recovering from motion or planning failures. To enable such bilateral, context-aware interactions under restricted communication, this work proposes MoRoCo, a unified framework for online coordination and exploration in multi-operator, multi-robot systems. MoRoCo enables the team to adaptively switch among three coordination modes: spread mode for parallelized exploration with intermittent data sharing, migrate mode for coordinated relocation, and chain mode for maintaining high-bandwidth connectivity through multi-hop links. These transitions are managed through distributed algorithms via only local communication. Extensive large-scale human-in-the-loop simulations and hardware experiments validate the necessity of incorporating human robot interactions and demonstrate that MoRoCo enables efficient, reliable coordination under limited communication, marking a significant step toward robust human-in-the-loop multi-robot autonomy in challenging environments.